What Was With Today's Impeachment Charges?

WASHINGTON—The day began with Kellyanne Conway's saying this remarkable thing to Chris Cuomo on CNN. They were talking about the general Republican embrace of the Gadsden Mall Creeper, Roy Moore, who may be less than a week away from being elected to the United State Senate from the state of Alabama, and Conway said some remarkable things.

"The president has tremendous moral standards.”

(OK, here is where Cuomo should have shut down the interview because it’s not fair to put manifest liars on the television. We continue)

“The president has said the allegations are troubling. They're also 40 years old. Nobody came forward before. The guy's been on the ballot many times. Doug Jones is a liberal Democrat, the president has said, and he doesn't want to live with a Democrat representing Alabama in the United States Senate."

As the day proceeded, the President* Jr. was appearing before a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee to talk about what role he may or may not have played in the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election. As he was testifying, the calls by Democratic senators for Senator Al Franken to resign began rolling in at a rate of about three-a-minute on the heels of a Politico story in which another woman accused him of unwanted sexual advances. All over Capitol Hill, reporters and camera crews ambushed legislators to find out if they were joining in the overall condemnation.

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(My feeling is that Franken likely will resign tomorrow. My feeling is also that, for all the talk about how this will give the Democrats the moral high ground on this issue, if Roy Moore gets elected, he will serve in the Senate as long as he wants to.)

Strangely, while all this was going on, Congressman Al Green, a Democrat representing the Ninth Congressional District in Texas, took to the floor of the House to deliver a privileged resolution.

“Resolved, That Donald John Trump, President of the United States is unfit to be President and is impeached for high misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the Senate,” it began.

OK, it was largely for show, and it was quickly shuffled into the depths of parliamentary hell. But it’s out there on the record, and, to be entirely fair, Green’s charges are very hard to argue with.

ARTICLE I: In his capacity as President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies necessary for stability within the society of the United States, Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed the society of the United States, brought shame and dishonor to the office of President of the United States, sowing discord among the people of the United States by associating the majesty and dignity of the presidency with causes rooted in white supremacy, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, white nationalism, or neo-Nazism…

ARTICLE II: In his capacity as President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office...Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than simply insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed American society by publicly casting contempt on individuals and groups, inciting hate and hostility, sowing discord among the people of the United States, on the basis of race, national origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation...

For his supporting evidence, Green cited everything from the president*’s Muslim ban to his having called protesting NFL players “sons of bitches,” all of it certainly relevant to the charge that the president* has demeaned his office, his fellow citizens, and democratic government all the way back to Pericles. Seriously, even if these charges do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses, which are defined hazily anyway, there isn’t one of them that’s wrong, or anywhere near as truthless as Conway’s assertion of the president*’s allegedly high moral standards.

And it’s easy to slough off Green’s resolution as frivolous. But I would remind everyone that, in the summer of 1997, before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky, Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia asked the House Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment inquiry of both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore on charges relating to Whitewater and to fundraising during their 1996 re-election campaign. This seemed so silly that even Laura Ingraham thought it to be so. But who was laughing at Bob Barr as 1998 moved into 1999?

This is where we all stood at the end of business on Wednesday, as the Senate was voting to go to conference with the House of Representatives on their abomination-of-desolation tax bill. (Congressman Mark Meadows, leader of the House Freedom Caucus, intimated that he and his merry band might use the CHIP funding as a bludgeon to pry free Democratic votes. Swell fella.) And the odds were very good that, by next Wednesday, Donald Trump would still be in the White House and Roy Moore would be a senator-elect and Al Franken would be a senator no more. And irony would die the 343rd of its 1,000 deaths.

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